Via the indispensable NewsBusters, even USA Today can’t carry this much water:

There’s awful, and then there’s atrociously, hilariously awful — a line NBC and Jimmy Smits soar across with Outlaw. A gambling, womanizing, conservative Supreme Court justice who chucks the court to become a crusader for the outcast and oppressed? That’s not a prime-time show, it’s a Saturday Night Live sketch.

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Preposterous to a painful degree, Outlaw is a vanity-show concept only an actor could love. Who wouldn’t want to play a larger-than-life devil on the outside/saint on the inside who’s worshiped and adored by the right-thinking and loathed and feared by evildoers? If only Smits had noticed that his playboy card-shark jurist was a dramatic contradiction in terms: a sanctimonious sinner, an intolerably smug one to boot. 

We meet Smits’ Justice Cyrus Garza as he’s being thrown out of a casino for counting cards. Outside, he stops to debate a case he’s due to decide with a pretty ACLU protester (because you know those justices, yak, yak, yak) — whom he then beds. But her words move him, and he resigns to become a trial lawyer. …. (more…)

Time for a POLL:

1. Is director James Cameron helping and truly trying to be helpful with the Gulf Oil Spill?

2. Is Cameron’s raging “those guys are morons” ego completely out of control but because he’s King of the Town That Funnels Millions in Campaign Cash to Obama, the Feds are now forced to appease the director and waste time doing so that could be spent mobilizing real solutions?

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Yes, it’s a loaded question. But I don’t see Kevin Costner, who donated an oil spill invention he’s invested years and millions on, spending an inordinate amount of time preening before television cameras and microphones, calling people “morons,” and then wondering why those same “morons” aren’t interested in wasting time validating a needy director’s existence his help.

Also, don’t write Cameron off as just another fuzzy-headed, liberal filmmaker. He’s a powerful, multi-millionaire with heavy political connections. And when it comes to the powerful trying to edge their way into this kind of a crisis you have to ask yourself what their real agenda might be. It is purely altruistic or is there a mercenary heart at work here? If Joe Scarborough’s shameless gushing is any kind of an indicator, we’ll never get the answer to that question. (more…)

You can watch these very troubling 25 seconds below and understand why Tom Hanks would never have the backbone to leave the comfortable echo chamber of MSNBC and enter an environment where he might be challenged. After the actor is done defaming the war against Imperial Japan as a war of “racism and terror,” he doubles with his anti-American slander and says the same of today’s War on Terror. And no one at Morning Joe challenges him. Not Tom — Greatest Generation — Brokaw, not Scarborough, and Mika Brezezinski can’t wait to agree with him. 

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Hanks made similarly outrageous statements in another interview, which I touched on earlier this week – comments that caught me completely off guard. As you might have read in Michael Broderick’s article from yesterday morning, “The Pacific” was a project Big Hollywood was eager to champion and cover. Obviously, we’ll have to see what Mr. Racism and Terror has in store for us on HBO over the coming weeks. But at this point you have to wonder if the Oscar-winner’s obvious issues regarding the War on Terror might not have colored what we’re about to see in his miniseries. Given the opportunity, Hanks has certainly been eager to tie together both wars into a damning but thoroughly indefensible political statement that portrays our country and military in the worst possible light.

We all assumed ”The Pacific” would be another “Band of Brothers,” and maybe it will be. But much has changed since “Brothers,” a miniseries produced prior to 9/11 (the HBO premiere was Sept. 9th, 2001). The very real Bush Derangement Syndrome (BDS) that has taken over so much of Hollywood and turned otherwise impressive filmmakers into ham-handed propagandists hadn’t quite taken hold yet. However, today Hanks is showing all the symptoms. Will this affect “The Pacific?” (more…)